DUBLIN’S DOCKLANDS area is unrecognisable from the industrial wasteland that was a blot on the cityscape in the 1990s.
The subject of frenzied development during the boom, it was only starting to reap the benefits of those investments in 2007 when the bubble burst. As a result the docklands, particularly south of the Liffey, began to be called “Namaland” by some.
The announcement this week that rapidly growing social-media company Twitter is to locate its third international office in Dublin and is zeroing in on a premises in the south city centre has revived another nickname for the area – Silicon Dock.
It’s more than just an easy marketing hook. Beginning in 2004 with Google’s office on Barrow Street, in the shadow of the historic Boland’s Mills, a cluster of the world’s leading internet companies has established a presence within a mile of the rejuvenated Grand Canal Dock (see map).
With more than 2,000 employees and having just spent close to €190 million for three office blocks on Barrow Street, Google is the centre of this cluster and the most deeply embedded.
It has been joined by Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn and Gilt Groupe.
Seven years ago, the area – between Ringsend and Pearse Street – would have been described euphemistically as “up and coming” by estate agents.
“You have to make a bet [on an area] at some stage, and you have to differentiate yourself,” says John Herlihy, Google’s vice-president for online sales and operations and its most senior executive in Dublin.
Google began small with the expectation that it would create a couple of hundred jobs. Its rapid growth is typical of the current crop of Silicon Valley companies.
In 2008 Facebook announced 40 jobs in Dublin. By the time it came to officially cutting the ribbon on its minimalist glass and steel offices in Grand Canal Dock, it had hired 70. More than 300 staff are now employed at the offices, which earlier this year hosted a rooftop gig by Bell X1 attended by Facebook’s billionaire chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
Companies like Zynga, LinkedIn and Facebook are expanding so rapidly that they eschew the normal template of announcing “x jobs to be created over y years”. Twitter took this to the extreme. IDA Ireland simply posted a Twitter message which read: “Ireland is trending. Twitter to establish international office in Dublin.”
While Twitter confirmed the move, it was left to Minister for Jobs Richard Bruton and the IDA’s spokesman to fill in the blanks. Their hope is that Twitter will follow the model of its predecessors and make Ireland an operational centre to support its business right across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
That means language skills are as much in demand as technology skills. Connie Gibney, director of human resources with LinkedIn, says the business networking site supports nine languages from its international headquarters in Dublin. To date, hiring staff with the requisite languages – even Russian and Turkish – has been relatively straightforward. “That’s one of the major benefits of Dublin – the wide array of talent available.”
Gibney says Dutch-speaking staff are the only ones that are hard to find in Dublin. While the first generation of tech multinationals – such as Intel, HP, Microsoft and IBM – have attracted international workers, Gibney says a lot of young people come here to study at English-language schools and decide to stay because of the availability of work.
Observers in cities like London and Berlin, which competed with Ireland for these investments, have pointed to Ireland’s 12.5 per cent corporation tax rate as an unfair advantage. Google in particular has come in for criticism for using Ireland to lower its worldwide tax bill. Herlihy maintains tax is not the reason it has created so many jobs here, although it is part of the mix.
“At the end of the day, to protect your profits from tax, you have to make profits,” he says.
“The world is full of companies that optimise for tax but forget their customers.”
While the multinationals benefit from each other’s presence by being able to fish in a pond of qualified staff, there are also signs the cluster is benefiting the indigenous technology sector.
Dogpatch Labs, an incubator for early-stage companies run by US venture capital fund Polaris, opened its first European operation down the street from Google yesterday.
Noel Ruane, the former IDA executive heading up Dogpatch in Dublin, says “Ireland is the internet capital of Europe” when it comes to foreign direct investment but, in the past two years, local startups have also started to attract international attention. “People are taking Dublin seriously as a startup capital.”
While Silicon Dock operates in and contributes to the Irish economy, the companies inhabit a parallel reality in many ways. All are in rapid recruitment mode and have hundreds of job vacancies. Even the property crash, which has seen a generation of homeowners plunged into paralysing negative equity, provides a silver lining. The modern blocks that Google purchased from the receivers of Liam Carroll’s collapsed property empire give it large open spaces that it can configure in its own unique manner – including branded pool tables, fridges full of free food and drink, and bean bags.
“This building is now considered state of the art within Google and we couldn’t have done that if we didn’t own it,” says Herlihy.
“We didn’t wish for the crash but you have to take advantage of what’s in front of you.”
